Dongarra: 100-Petaflop Supers By 2017, Exascale by 2020

With IBM’s announcement of a 10-Petaflop supercomputer for deployment next year at Argonne National Laboratory, Antone Gonsalves over at Information Week quotes Jack Dongarra saying that we can expect 100 Petaflop supercomputers to be deployed in 2017.

Jack Dongarra, a computing expert at the University of Tennessee who helped design the technology used in testing systems on the Top 500 list, said he expects more 10-petaflop-plus systems next year. “Everything is moving along according to Moore’s law, so things are doubling every 18 months, roughly,” Dongarra told InformationWeek. Dongarra predicted computer makers in 2017 will have 100-petaflop systems, with “exascale” systems between 2018 and 2020. An exascale, or extreme-scale, computer is expected to be a thousand times faster than a petascale system. “All of these things are dependent on funding,” Dongarra said in an interview. “This will happen if the funding is in place for those machines.”

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